In view of this fact it become again very hard to establish the
author's status in the business world, and at moments I have grave
question whether he belongs there at all, except as a novelist. There
is, of course, no outlay for him in this sort, any more than in any
other sort of literature, but it at least supposes and exacts some
measure of preparation. A young writer may produce a brilliant and
very perfect romance, just as he may produce a brilliant and very
perfect poem, but in the field of realistic fiction, or in what we used
to call the novel of manners, a writer can only produce an inferior
book at the outset. For this work he needs experience and observation,
not so much of others as of himself, for ultimately his characters will
all come out of himself, and he will need to know motive and character
with such thoroughness and accuracy as he can acquire only through his
own heart. A man remains in a measure strange to himself as long as he
lives, and the very sources of novelty in his work will be within
himself; he can continue to give it freshness in no other way than by
knowing himself better and better. But a young writer and an untrained
writer has not yet begun to be acquainted even with the lives of other
men. The world around him remains a secret as well as the world within
him, and both unfold themselves simultaneously to that experience of
joy and sorrow that can come only with the lapse of time. Until he is
well on toward forty, he will hardly have assimilated the materials of
a great novel, although he may have accumulated them. The novelist,
then, is a man of letters who is like a man of business in the
necessity of preparation for his calling, though he does not pay
store-rent, and may carry all his affairs under his hat, as the phrase
is. He alone among men of letters may look forward to that sort of
continuous prosperity which follows from capacity and diligence in
other vocations; for story-telling is now a fairly recognized trade,
and the story-teller has a money-standing in the economic world. It is
not a very high standing, I think, and I have expressed the belief that
it does not bring him the respect felt for men in other lines of
business. Still our people cannot deny some consideration to a man who
gets a hundred dollars a thousand words. That is a fact appreciable to
business, and the man of letters in the line of fiction may reasonably
feel that his place in our civilization, though he may owe it to the
women who form the great mass of his readers, has something of the
character of a vested interest in the eyes of men. There is, indeed,
as yet no conspiracy law which will avenge the attempt to injure him in
his business. A critic, or a dark conjuration of critics, may damage
him at will and to the extent of their power, and he has no recourse
but to write better books, or worse. The law will do nothing for him,
and a boycott of his books might be preached with immunity by any class
of men not liking his opinions on the question of industrial slavery or
antipaedobaptism. Still the market for his wares is steadier than the
market for any other kind of literary wares, and the prices are better.
The historian, who is a kind of inferior realist, has something like
the same steadiness in the market, but the prices he can command are
much lower, and the two branches of the novelist's trade are not to be
compared in a business way. As for the essayist, the poet, the
traveller, the popular scientist, they are nowhere in the competition
for the favor of readers. The reviewer, indeed, has a pretty steady
call for his work, but I fancy the reviewers who get a hundred dollars
a thousand words could all stand upon the point of a needle without
crowding one another; I should rather like to see them doing it.
Another gratifying fact of the situation is that the best writers of
fiction who are most in demand with the magazines, probably get nearly
as much money for their work as the inferior novelists who outsell them
by tens of thousands, and who make their appeal to the innumerable
multitude of the less educated and less cultivated buyers of fiction in
book-form. I think they earn their money, but if I did not think all
of the higher class of novelists earned so much money as they get, I
should not be so invidious as to single out for reproach those who did
not.
The difficulty about payment, as I have hinted, is that literature has
no objective value really, but only a subjective value, if I may so
express it. A poem, an essay, a novel, even a paper on political
economy, may be worth gold untold to one reader, and worth nothing
whatever to another. It may be precious to one mood of the reader, and
worthless to another mood of the same reader. How, then, is it to be
priced, and how is it to be fairly marketed? All people must be fed,
and all people must be clothed, and all people must be housed; and so
meat, raiment, and shelter are things of positive and obvious
necessity, which may fitly have a market price put upon them. But
there is no such positive and obvious necessity, I am sorry to say, for
fiction, or not for the higher sort of fiction. The sort of fiction
which corresponds to the circus and the variety theatre in the
show-business seems essential to the spiritual health of the masses,
but the most cultivated of the classes can get on, from time to time,
without an artistic novel. This is a great pity, and I should be very
willing that readers might feel something like the pangs of hunger and
cold, when deprived of their finer fiction; but apparently they never
do. Their dumb and passive need is apt only to manifest itself
negatively, or in the form of weariness of this author or that. The
publisher of books can ascertain the fact through the declining sales
of a writer; but the editor of a magazine, who is the best customer of
the best writers, must feel the market with a much more delicate touch.
Sometimes it may be years before he can satisfy himself that his
readers are sick of Smith, and are pining for Jones; even then he
cannot know how long their mood will last, and he is by no means safe
in cutting down Smith's price and putting up Jones's. With the best
will in the world to pay justly, he cannot. Smith, who has been boring
his readers to death for a year, may write to-morrow a thing that will
please them so much that he will at once be a prime favorite again; and
Jones, whom they have been asking for, may do something so
uncharacteristic and alien that it will be a flat failure in the
magazine. The only thing that gives either writer positive value is
his acceptance with the reader; but the acceptance is from month to
month wholly uncertain. Authors are largely matters of fashion, like
this style of bonnet, or that shape of gown. Last spring the dresses
were all made with lace berthas, and Smith was read; this year the
butterfly capes are worn, and Jones is the favorite author. Who shall
forecast the fall and winter modes?